Would anyone care to share any feedback about BMC Service Desk Express? I have not seen a demo of it yet, or laid hands on the software, but I've heard that it is a bit light on the configuration mgmt side, being more asset oriented instead.

I've worked extensively with Service Desk applications, developing and implementing them over the last 12 years. I've used SDE and I don't like it. SDE is marketed as being "ITIL compliant" which is a horrible term in itself but there are definitely some applications which adhere to the ITIL framework better than SDE.

There is some weird stuff in SDE... you cannot link an Incident to a Change for one! The interface is very clicky... no consistency between single clicks and double-clicks and forget it if you like using the keyboard. It is Asset focussed and doesn't really do Configuration Management, even though the tag for the module says so. And it's an extremely buggy application... well, the latest release is (9.0 I think). It's strange because early versions of the product (when it was Magic) were very good. My suspicion is that in the drive to claim ITIL compliancy, they've lost the focus on what used to be a very solid application.

That said, the application is aimed at the SME market and not intended for large organisations, i.e. you can't compare it to applications like Remedy (also BMC), CA Unicenter or Peregrine. However, in the same market are applications like HEAT, Infraweb and Marval. All of these I consider better than SDE.

But, as always, you have to make the assessment based on your Service Desk requirements, the size of your organisation and, of course, your budget.

Just thought I would add a few comments both in support of SDE and support of blamblam:

Personally, I think it is an awesome product that has a huge potential. The trick with it is that you need (again my opinion) a qualified SDE admin who knows what they are doing to get the best out of the tool.

For example OOTB blamblam is absolutely right - you cant link incidents to changes. However, a very simply configuration and you can. I personally have never had an issue with the consistency of mouse clicks but I would have to agree that the first release of SDE (unpatched) was horrendously buggy. A good number of those have now been fixed but not all.

blamblam's comments re configuration management I think are fair. The asset management/configuration management side of the product requires alot of work on the administrators part to make it work the way you would expect. BMC have just released an Integration tool that will improve this.